Posted
by
BeauHDon Wednesday November 23, 2016 @05:00AM
from the abort-the-mission dept.

bsharma writes: USS Zumwalt suffered engine failure and collided with lock walls while transiting the Panama Canal. The ship lost propulsion in its port shaft during the transit and the crew saw water intrusion in two of the four bearings that connect to Zumwalt's port and starboard Advanced Induction Motors (AIMs) to the drive shafts, a defense official told USNI News on Tuesday. The AIMs are the massive electrical motors that are driven by the ship's gas turbines and, in turn, electrically power the ship's systems and drive the shafts. USNI News reports: "Zumwalt entered the Panama Canal following a successful port visit to Columbia last week -- a visit which the service intended to skip if it thought the engineering problems would continue, several defense officials told USNI News. The ship's engineering plant -- the Integrated Power System (IPS) -- is arguably the most complex and unique in the service. Installing and testing the system -- that provides ship additional power margins to power high energy weapons and sensors -- was a primary reason the ship delivered months late to the service. Before the casualty, the ship was set to arrive in San Diego by the end of the year and start weapon system activation period before joining the fleet as an operational warship sometime in 2018. (Zumwalt is the first of three in the $22-billion class.)

It's not entirely clear if it's the AIMs that failed, or if something else sized up the shafts first.

The article states that two of four bearings on the driveshaft(s) that connect the AIMs to the propulsion system (reads, gearbox and screws) failed due to water ingress. If that's two shafts per propulsion set (AIM, gears and screws) and one on each side blew, then yeah, thats going to put you dead in the water.

What is not clear is if there are multiple shafts that can load balance AIM torque across to the propulsion set equally, or two shafts per AIM, each going to a port and starboard gearbox/screw. Wh

Not much fine maneuvering normally needed on the ship's part. As long as it can supply some propulsion, the mulas (electric locomotives atop the lock walls) keep it centered. I'm guessing the propulsion failure was abrupt and asymmetric enough to overpower them.

What's crazy is that sealing propeller shafts against water ingress is a **solved problem** and regardless of how "hi tech" and "modern" this ship is, there is no excuse for it to have failed, absolutely none.

Sure, but a boat has two jobs: stay afloat and be able to drive around a bit while floating.

The failure mode in question is well understood and has been extremely well characterised, which is why I claim it's a "solved problem". Nearly all stuffing box failures are due to lack of maintenance. Here is some interesting reading for those unfamiliar with this particular skerrick of engineering:

Sure, but a boat has two jobs: stay afloat and be able to drive around a bit while floating.

The failure mode in question is well understood and has been extremely well characterised, which is why I claim it's a "solved problem". Nearly all stuffing box failures are due to lack of maintenance.

Yeah but that's entirely my point. Just because something is extremely well understood or has a really simple job doesn't mean we don't manage to screw it up over and over again, especially when moving parts are involved, even more especially when you expand across industry of rotating equipment. There are many services even easier than a boat engine where things fail. I've seen many stuffing box failures due to design faults, manufacture faults, or installation faults. You don't read about them too much in

Re "What's crazy is that sealing propeller shafts against water ingress is a **solved problem** and regardless of how "hi tech" and "modern" this ship is, there is no excuse for it to have failed, absolutely none."
This is not the UK navy of 1900. Real engineers don't watch steam power and bearings or early turbines with great care.
US engineers, captains, staff are not aware of the limitations, secret contractor specs of their vital systems anymore.
In the past, say the UK, every system was tested, unde

Ya know, I completely misread the piece. Two of four bearings failed, implying two shafts, not four. That's what I get for R'ing TFA. Durp.

But again, if one seal per shaft blew (presumably, the one at the water side, which implies poor design as the Navy have seen leaks in this area before) that's both shafts out. You'd guess the AIMs are set up so if their current consumption hit a certain threshold the system would assume a stalled motor and cut supply, so not matter how the bearings failed, it was li

But think of the profit evert time it returns to port. All the teams of contractors fixing systems, no bid contracts for years.
The US navy only wants to educate its crews to stay at a set speed, not turn to much beyond a set speed and return to port for complex repairs before a set date.
Crews just have to look at a gui that says all green and its still all good.
If the US navy takes the project out of port and does not stay within set specs it will fail. Don't go too far out, no fancy fast turns. Don't

It all is just a gigantic, insanely expensive and pathetically wasteful jobs program. I don't think these things could even survive short periods of real combat. They aren't made for combat, they are made for profit. This is what we are doing instead of rebuilding our infrastructure and making a smart electric grid. As long as people don't complain, the Pentagon is just going to keep on doing it.

It's truly amazing the number of high cost non-useful weapons systems/platforms the US has been buying recently. I don't know whether the problem is bleeding edge or that the contractor gets paid even if it doesn't work.

I was in the Nuclear Propulsion Program in the Navy. By necessity, quality control and training were at near-religious levels. But the systems themselves were designed above all for reliability. One aspect of that was simplicity.

The Zumwalt isn't a nuke, just an over-priced gas turbo-electric. The tech surrounding this project is an engineer's wet dream.However, they have built the flimsiest of paper tigers. It's supposed to be a combatant warship, not a science fair demonstration project, and not a contractor piggy-bank for taxpayer dollars.

The idea of propulsion plant automation as a labor-saving measure is laudable, but the concept is scalar, not linear. There is a tradeoff to be made here, and prudence seems to have gone overboard the garbage. More points of failure with fewer resources to respond to failures does not make for a reliable combat system. Automation gone wild might be OK commercial ships where the price of failure is less, but this is supposed to be a fighting ship, not a bulk freighter.

We have seen the same folly in the littoral combatants and the ridiculously moribund Ford-class carrier.

Who the hell is driving this reliability-be-damned design regime? Certainly not the war fighters.

"Defense" is really just an elaborate ruse to transfer money from taxpayers to corporations.This project is the epitome of overpriced absurdity. I'm sure all the contractors got rich from it... and they don't really care if it actually works.

You know why Commercial software is now better than military software? Security clearances. Citizens who cant cut it in the commercial space against H1Bs go to the defense space as there a security clearance and being a citizen is more important than being able to do the work.

Meh, errors happen. The Nimitz class has a design flaw where it lists to the side under a full combat load. The Knox class took damage from heavy seas and were expensive to run. The Cyclone class suffered severe metal fatigue after just 15 years. Every class has some problem or another in development, testing, or active service. At least this problem can probably be fixed relatively easily.

There is good logic in "When you try new things, there will be errors, and a main purpose of defense spending is to find and resolve these errors so that our capabilities can remain ahead of our enemies". But there is also a point at which staying ahead of our enemies in high tech weaponry can makes us vulnerable to lower cost ways to win wars. Right now it seems clear to me that the US is erring toward high-tech highly fragile military systems. The future is probably very high tech, but it will be high

Who the hell is driving this reliability-be-damned design regime? Certainly not the war fighters.

People looking for the ego/resume boost of being involved in a major technologically advanced procurement and a sweet, sweet gig working for a contractor after retirement (with full military pension of course) supporting said procurement.

It's a bit early to start calling it a design flaw. The ship is still undergoing testing and wont enter service for another year or more. Every big engineering project like this suffers some problems out of the gate. That is why they get tested. Is the ships crew too small? Perhaps, but we won't know unless it's tried. But if the manpower reduction schemes work, it could save the Navy huge sums of money. Money that could be spent on more or better armed ships.

It seems like a design flaw to me since it happened on both shafts. That said, the whole point of a shakedown cruise is to find problems like this so they can be fixed before the ship it put into service. The headline could have read "Shakedown cruise finds problems, Navy promises to fix them."

Hard to tell if it was a design flaw or unforeseen condition like precision movement at low RPM or some such. Moreover, the solution to the problem is well beyond what anyone here knows. The architecture (hybrid electric) has challenges, but opens up huge opportunities as well.

In my opinion that's a serious mistake. You can reduce manpower without consequence right up until you're in combat. At that point you didn't have enough sailors to check the radar cables, or you didn't send someone to organize the fire locker, or you didn't have an extra pair of eyeballs on lookout, or you're going in to combat with guys that just worked a double shift and that's BEFORE the fur starts to fly. Do your sailors go to an extra firefighting team or to the radar screens? Do they help the loaders

I was in the Nuclear Propulsion Program in the Navy. By necessity, quality control and training were at near-religious levels. But the systems themselves were designed above all for reliability. One aspect of that was simplicity.

The Zumwalt isn't a nuke, just an over-priced gas turbo-electric. The tech surrounding this project is an engineer's wet dream.However, they have built the flimsiest of paper tigers. It's supposed to be a combatant warship, not a science fair demonstration project, and not a contractor piggy-bank for taxpayer dollars.

The idea of propulsion plant automation as a labor-saving measure is laudable, but the concept is scalar, not linear. There is a tradeoff to be made here, and prudence seems to have gone overboard the garbage. More points of failure with fewer resources to respond to failures does not make for a reliable combat system. Automation gone wild might be OK commercial ships where the price of failure is less, but this is supposed to be a fighting ship, not a bulk freighter.

We have seen the same folly in the littoral combatants and the ridiculously moribund Ford-class carrier.

Who the hell is driving this reliability-be-damned design regime? Certainly not the war fighters.

I studied marine engineering and have several friends from university who work at the shipyard (General Dynamic Bath Iron Works) where the Zumwalt was designed and built. They are among the most patriotic people I know. Individually, they are also smart. But collectively, they are the dumbest bunch of government contract exploiters I have ever seen. From the ship specification (solution in search of a problem) to the expensive and idiotic design choices, the Zumwalt is a complete disaster. We had BIW representatives on our college campus 10 years ago telling us all about the wonderful things the DDX program (which eventually became the single-ship Zumwalt class) could do. It sounded like a car salesman pitch then, and I am not surprised at all how it turned out. There are very good reasons they only built one and then ordered more Arleigh Burke destroyers instead. There is something very, very wrong when the 15,000 ton Zumwalt destroyer costs $3.96B/unit (excluding R&D costs). For comparison, a much more capable 9000 Ton Arleigh Burke destroyer costs $1.84B and you can get a 100,000 ton Ford-class aircraft carrier for $10.44B.

"We had BIW representatives on our college campus 10 years ago telling us all about the wonderful things the DDX program (which eventually became the single-ship Zumwalt class) could do."

I doubt this. Everyone I know (EVERYONE, including former Navy Liason) at BIW never ever championed or justified Navy designs or plans. They built boats. They just built boats. They identified problems and solved them, usually ahead of schedule and under budget. They pointed out recognizable deficiencies, adapted to changi

One thing (it seems to me) is that the U.S. Navy has not had to engage in ship to ship warfare in a LONG time. Granted in the modern era that will probably be a pretty fast thing with missiles, but the other services have at least had to deal with close combat situations that stress what you have (say...a rifle on the battlefield). If it fails, you die.
When was the last time a combat vessel failed for the navy in combat conditions that caused a catastrophic loss of life? It's been a while.
My guess is th

I, too, was in the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program. And while it does have a nearly-sterling operational and maintenance program, history has "conveniently" forgotten some of the program's mis-steps over the years.

- The USS SEAWOLF -- SSN 575 [wikipedia.org], not the badass SSN-21 [wikipedia.org] -- used a liquid sodium reactor that was plagued by reliability problems. After its first deployment, the reactor was replaced with a traditional PWR.

- The USS JACK -- SSN 605 [wikipedia.org] -- was unique in that she had contra-rotating propellers. These were generally unreliable, although the linked wikipedia reference doesn't say much about them.

- The USS GLENARD P. LIPSCOMB -- SSN 685 [wikipedia.org] -- was the second attempt at electric drive. But both of these boats ended up being heavier, slower, larger, and more expensive than their counterparts.

- There's another submarine, I can't remember which one, had some unique aspect of its turbines, which was not effective. It was SSN-6XX, but its nickname was building 6XX because it was in the repair yard so frequently.

In the grand scheme of things, the above hiccups are a miniscule portion of the overall fleet. The Zumwalt ship is one of three in the entire $22B class. So, I think the naval nuclear propulsion program has been blessed in that it has been able to experiment and occasionally "miss" with some

The same idiots who wanted the F-35 to be able to do everything and therefore it does nothing well? There seems to be this idea that as long as the money keeps rolling in to the military-industrial complex, it doesn't matter if none of these projects ever really works well. Just keep that money rolling. We'll win wars on quantity, not quality.

Unfortunately it's very sustainable if we sustain military funding levels as we have for so long. They practically have to burn money to continue using their budgets and allowing congresspeople to look tough and patriotic by voting yet another increase to a national military budget that's already a third of the entire world's military budget.

I really wonder what some of the top brass are thinking. It seems like everyone has forgotten that its somewhat important that military assets have a degree of disposability. Not that want loose to planes or ships in any conflict but you will, even if you have a high degree of technical superiority over the enemy. If it takes a decade and $5B to replace a single asset you have a problem.

I wonder how far our massive military budget would go in a conflict against a state actor with real military hardware (

Well a lot of that is R&D costs that was supposed to be spread out over 32 ships, but the order was dropped to 3. They cost $7.5 Billion per ship, but the cost excluding R&D was a mere $3.96 billion. It's the same reason it's guns ammo costs $80,000 per round. The R&D costs were supposed to have been spread out over enough rounds to cover 32 ships, but at just 3 ships, the cost skyrocketed as the order size dropped.

Honestly, the DoD needs to decide to scrap a program before they start buildi

Actually there's a recent spate of articles indicating that the Navy won't proceed with the ammo, which jumped to $800,000/round.While I agree with R&D being necessary, even cutting back to only three ships this seems like a tremendous sink hole of money.

So, Extremely expensive R&D, Avg. Cost/Ship $7.5B which is more than nuclear powered Nimitz Ronald Regan ($6.5B) it leaks, uses ammo that is 10x more than projected in terms of cost. This needs to be scrapped. I think that's what's missing really

You are correct, I left off a zero. It was supposed to cost around 80K per round, around the same cost as a weapon system the army has with similar capabilities, but the order cut drove the price up to the point that they might as well just toss it and fire tomahawk missiles. At this point the navy is stuck with the ships. I think they are going to use them as tech demonstrators to shake out what does and doesn't work. That's about the only value they can get out of them at this point.

and yet, you lacked the honesty.The ship is under 4B if you exclude the R&D [wikipedia.org]
The issue is that normally, you spread out the R&D over a number of crafts, and that reduces it quickly.
And since they brought it down from 32 to 3, well, that only raised the costs.
Kind of like the difference of ULA vs SpaceX rockets.

The first article mentions seawater intrusion: I suspect that if there were more crew, this would have been detected before it caused the propulsion system to become an 'engineering casualty'.

Pro Tip: you man combat ships based on combat requirements, meaning sufficient hands for damage control and major emergency repairs. The Zumwalt-class manning apparently does not take that into account. . .

zumwalt is being shook down just like all naval ships are.
Bearing failures would have produced alarms all over.
And 140 is plenty. In fact, I would argue that we need a lot more automation and better design (nuke reactor, outside-mounted motors, etc), so as to have fewer ppl.

That and the fact that even when they managed to ding a US tank, it just dinged it while the US Tank guns, that could be shot while on the move and from nearly three times the range, even through sand berms, sent the Sov design tank turrets spinning into the air.

Hell we even tried to destroy in place a stuck in the sand M1 and were unable to do so. The first two shots just grooved the front armor, a third from the side, went into the ammo compartment, the blow out panels worked as designed and odds are the hit would have been survivable by the crew (though they would have had burn injuries). Before they could try to shoot again a couple more recovery vehicles showed up and they were able to pull it free and it was towed back and sent to a lab to be examined, but if needed a new turret could have been swapped in and the vehicle sent back into combat within a couple days.

To be fair the T-72 was obsolete in 1990. And even the T-94 lacked an armor comparable to the Chobham Composite armor the West uses. Don't know if they finally managed to steal the tech for their current tanks, which supposedly have a greater range than the Abrams, but range means nothing if your shots simply bounce off the target.

There was no need to steal anything. Matter of fact, composite armour was introduced with the T-64. It was actually the first tank to have that, along with quite a lot of other firsts that make the tank quite problematic. Bouncing shots is something that can happen with a HE-FRAG shell, but that is something that stopped with WW2. Modern shots are either APFSDS (the new shells for the 125mm gun introduced in the 1990ies would probably be able to penetrate the M1A2 frontal hull at ranges lower than 2 km), HE

Actually Chobham armor did/does need to be stolen as it is (as of last time I looked) classified in the exact composition and manufacture processes.The example I gave of the stuck tank had two shots with Sabot penetrators bounce off the front glacis with just grooves in the armor. The third shot was a side shot right into the ammo compartment, and the blowout panels worked as designed, unless the loader had just happened to have the ammo door open at that moment the crew would have survived, while the Iraq

Chobham is just a marketing name for a certain composite armour, nothing more. A lot of countries use composite armour nowadays, even India and China, it is really nothing special anymore. Nobody has used rolled homogeneous armour for "fucking years, absolutely years".

KE penetrators don't bounce as such, they either shatter or go in. The only reason for them to bounce would be hitting in a very unlucky angle, which is quite unlikely. Very old KE penetrators that were very short and made of steel might bounc

T-62 is perfectly capable of firing (and hitting) on the move. This isn't a WW2 design, even its predesessors have received two plane stabilisation in the fifties.T-62 is just very old and very, very light compared to the M1. Two thirds of the M1 weight tops. Funny fact - T-62 was considered overweight at its introduction, hence its successor - T-64, a much better machine in every way - weighted a couple of tons fewer.

The aviation industry has been milking the government out of hundreds of billions for decades by delivering sub par aircraft, with delayed delivery, over budget & with massive maintenance/parts requirements. I suppose it was only a matter of time before the naval industry decided they wanted in on that action and began the same campaign of pork mining. Isn't this how the Soviet Union fell? Dumping obscene amounts of money into faulty programs (mostly military) until their economy could stand no more a

yeah, the 1/3 of the military budget thing is a joke. About as bad as the idiots that do CO2 emissions per capita, but then run around screaming about total size of china's AE (which in a per capita fashion is SMALL).
With budgets like this, to make them comparable, it is better to look at military / % GDP. And America is in the middle, and that is with Russia and CHina hiding much of their spending.

The ship's engineering plant -- the Integrated Power System (IPS) -- is arguably the most complex and unique in the service.

This statement should have read: "The ship's engineering plant -- the Integrated Power System (IPS) -- is arguably the most complex, unique and prone to failure and hacking in the service.Eemphasis mine.

these are brand new and were compromised by CONgress.
I think that long term, these will prove themselves to be the way to go.
The only other change is that we should make at least 1/2, if not all of them, nuke powered, and not diesel.

I believe scraping the locks is considered a sign of bad luck for the ship. You really don't want a warship that has intermittent power.

Brings to mind an old story I heard from some airline pilots as FMS Flight Management Systems (very non user friendly) were integrated into airliners. Previously if something went wrong on an aircraft in flight one or both of the pilots would say something to the effect of "Oh $^it we've got to.....", but now its "Why'd it just do that?"

It is incredibly disturbing to me that a deployed destroyer's propulsion system can't even survive "minor contact" with the lock walls. It's particularly worrisome that the failure mode was for the propulsion drives to completely lock up, rendering the ship immobile.

I can see losing one drive shaft due to a collision, but both?!

How is the ship going to continue to function after getting hit by an enemy missile?

How is this possibly a robust and combat ready design when one of the two critical functions (pro

There needs to be some hashtag analogous to "RichPersonProblems" for military groups. Easy to look up that the $22.5B price tag is for THREE warships. That's like enough money to sort out all the lead water services in Flint and surrounding towns; then all the rest of them in the United States, probably 250,000 of them, delivering neurotoxins directly into the populace (if ISIS were doing it, the money would be there already)....and enough left over for a couple of hundred highway interchanges that wou